UV lamps and photography

Hi!

I'm about to buy an UV-lamp for looking at and identifying fluorescent minerals and I was thinking about doing some mineral photography in the future and that could include fluorescent minerals. So I was wondering how many Watts should the lamp make to work for taking fluo-photos? I spotted one from way too cool called "the triple" with 4W, is that sufficient? Anyone tried it out? I'm a total beginner at photography so it doesn't have to be for perfect quality

Hi Radek

If you take a look at mindat image 348362 uraninite with secondary uranium fluoro`s . I have taken the parent image in normal light and the child image 348358 with uv,,, used a 6 watt uv tube and a canon powershot G11 camera.

Hope this helps

Good luck

Regards george

I've had a 3-way (SW, MW and LW) Way Too Cool UV lamp for years and love it. It's a good, multi-purpose lamp at a good price. Having MW is a bonus, there are many calcites, for example, that fluoresce better at MW than either SW or LW. The big handle on the side opposite the lamps and low weight makes it easy to hold at any angle at home and to point down at the ground and carry around comfortably in the field (get a battery pack for it). Relatively long power cord means you can reach your specimens on shelves (it will light up a whole wall of these) or on the studio table easily. The tubes are bright enough for photography, but expect exposures at say f8 to be 5, 10, 20 or even 30 seconds depending on the response of the mineral. Longer for more depth of field. So your camera needs long exposure and tripod mounting capability. One issue I'm grappling with is color temp. What should it be set at? Right now I set it custom white balance to halogen lights that simulate daylight, but I find the SW images have too much blue and I have to slide the blue color balance all the way down in Photoshop so the specimen looks like the eye sees it. LW images have too much blue and magenta and are harder to fix. This is not the lamp's fault though.

Radek,
A competing beginners UV lamp is the Raytec Versalume. I have had good luck with it for pictures, mineral identification, and prospecting. It has LW and SW; AC plugin, and battery.
-Dean Allum